Cetaceus

Here in Philadelphia the music/musical community that I have found myself spending the most time seeing live/hanging out in is on the whole comprised of a large-ish number of classically trained and highly skilled music students, who in their spare time and I imagine boredom, play a lot of what they call “avante-garde experimental music.” This translates almost directly into “a bunch of people going rrWeeWrrs bikuzzcx! xzoing+-+-rrr” and making other horrible sounds really slowly with various instruments and other objects. As my esteemed colleague and friend Ben has pointed out, and I don’t think really needs to be said, most of this music is neither music nor good. I do have to say that on some level some of it is extremely interesting, and a small amount of it is really fucking awesome to listen to, for very different reasons than most music is good to listen to. However, I will stand by my statement with confidence that most of it is just a complete waste of time.

The main source of a lot of this stuff is an organization known as Bower Bird, run by a local musician and seemingly good guy, although I don’t personally know him. Like I said, all of these people who do this stuff are otherwise highly trained and extremely talented people, and I think that this is part of the novelty, and part of what makes it both problematic and interesting to me on a few counts. At other given times, many of these folks are writing and performing more standard musical works, which of course vary in quality as does anything else. And again, even horrible noises inhabit a range of more and less interesting.

One of the first and most pressing points to be made about this is something Ben and I were discussing last night. Namely that it is extremely difficult to write good music. And I mean this on all levels. I will hold forever that it is just as difficult not so much to simply write a folk guitar song as it is to write a symphony, but definitely to do either and make it good, let alone moving, compelling or the like. So in a very central way, making a bunch of horrible noises and calling it art, no matter how seriously you do it, is a cop-out. It’s easy, lazy and as such most of the time it’s plain boring. As I put it to another friend last night, you cannot outflank good art, there are no shortcuts. Now, I’ll say again, some of this stuff is really good, but there are certain characteristics that the actually good stuff takes that I probably won’t have time to outline here.

This point really hit home with me at the show Ben, the other Dan, my sister Angela and I all went to last night, put on by the above organization. There were four acts, three of which were exactly what I just described. To be fair, the first act, a girl from France and a guy from Sweden making weird noises with a base and a piano and a bunch of junk was ok. Although I would never sit and listen to a recording of it, or choose to see it live again, it did have the effect of eliciting a kind of meditative calm in myself and other corroborating listeners. It was the second act, a set of 3 works called The Pygmy Variations by a girl I see around here a lot, an amazing young vibraphone player and, as it turns out, composer. The group performing consisted of 3 violins, a double bass, cello, the composer herself keeping time with on of those African bead shakers, and a woman playing this amazing African vibraphone type instrument, with gourds at the bottom for resonators. The piece was, without a doubt, absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. It had a more or less Steve Reichian feel to it, and the clear and noted skill of the players came out forcefully in the deft execution of the music. It was very clear to me that the composer had put not only a lot of time, effort and thought, but honestly a lot of love into it. It’s this latter that I think may even be missing from a lot of the highly technical, though very listenable, music that the noise-makers create in their spare time.

Before the piece began, the composer gave a brief explanation of the inspiration for the work, the music of the Pygmy people of the Central African Republic. The point that stayed with me the most, throughout both this set and the others, was when she said of these people that “the music is always a celebration.” And I think that this is precisely the word for music at its best, although it left me thinking critically about even this piece, which it should be clear I very much enjoyed. While sitting through the two last sets of people making horrible noises I could not help but think to myself, “this is not a celebration, this is a gallery opening or worse.”

It then struck me that even the Pygmy-celebration inspired work, which got me thinking about all this in the first place, was not by my reckoning any form of celebration at all. I was personally not celebrating anything, as a matter of fact I was doing nothing but sitting there. It seems that in our culture, and perhaps historically, much music isn’t really that celebratory. In fact, music seems to more often than not take the form of a spectator sport, a one-way viewing experience, modeled willingly or not on a kind of “production and consumption” model. Clearly this isn’t the case all the time, there are some extremely potent counter examples, but the fact remains. The vast majority of concerts, be they avante-garde noise, indie rock shows, operas or whatever, are not celebratory at all in the sense of a communal, participatory act of physical joy (which is my going gut definition of celebration right now). The problem of this is compounded, and felt most acutely, when one finds oneself standing there with aching knees for hours on end watching some boring New York(-esque) indie band or hearing dudes rub pieces of metal on drum heads.

There was a kind of delighted smile on that young woman’s lips when she explained this connection between music and celebration, or more accurately music as celebration. And the show last night left me longing to feel musically what those far-off Pygmies feel. Later, as we waxed philosophical on the issue, I came back around to my increasingly regular nostalgic refrain for the punk/hardcore scene that I’d spent a good deal of my younger/college days a part of. The raw energy and inherently participatory nature of these genres, especially in the right context (basement, firehall, suburban VFW), is something I often rhetorically celebrate when discussing music with others. Thinking about it in this way, I can take it a step further and say that the celebration has already come and gone in the shows themselves, the pileons, singalongs, dancing, etc. There are many other contemporary genres that exhibit this celebratory mood, although I may personally not be so into them (I’m thinking about the way hippies interact with jam bands, club kids with techno, etc).

It brings me back again to a nagging problem that I have watching virtuoso music, especially in the concert hall setting. Whether it’s a conscious thing or not (and I don’t think it is) you can always pick up, even minutely, a kind of officiating air coming from the musicians behind their sheets. There is a sense that “we are the authorities and we are here to educate you,” rather than the kind of DIY “we’re all in this together so let’s have some fun.” Clearly this isn’t completely true or fair, and I am certainly not arguing for some kind of “rockism” or saying that there is no place for highly technical composed music. I am saying however that this doesn’t make something about that not annoy me (in very slight, random ways), or that I am ever going to enjoy listening to such people bang on broken metal with no aim.

I want to ask myself from now on when I go to a show, or make music myself, is this a celebration? Or is it just another idea, dumb or not. I think that observing music that moves you to a point that you become wrapped up in it definitely falls into the celebration category, but I am very hesitant to say that it does so as much as physically or musically participating yourself. There’s also a strange kind of equation to be calculated along the lines of “Does this music do it’s job so well that it transcends itself into the category of celebration?” vs./and/or “Are we celebrating, and does our celebration take the form of music?” These last questions, and the relationship between the two, definitely need further fleshing out.

Bored at work today, I decided to categorize my past travel experiences. Here goes:

Sovereign Nations I Have Spent Significant Time in:

The U.S., Finland, Estonia (x2), U.K, France (x3), Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, Japan

Politically amorphous and non-contiguous geographic zones:

Taiwan, Gibralter

That brings the total of politically autonomous or semi-autonomous places, including the US, that I have done more than “pass through” to 22.

Now, places I’ve passed though, either by plane, train or automobile, and not really substantially visited:

Canada, Germany, Slovakia, Latvia

The top five places that I haven’t been that I want to visit next, in no particular order:

• China
• Venezuela
• Ukraine
• Mongolia
• Anywhere in Africa, or Russia

U.S. States I have spent significant time in:

New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, West Virgina, Virgina, North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, California, Oregon, Washington

For a total of 21 states I can really say I’ve visited. Now, states I’ve passed through by car or plane:

Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, Maryland, Delaware

For a total of 12. The one state that is on the fence here is Colorado, because while passing through, I spent 5 very intense and interesting hours in Denver at a big festival where some local goths bought me and some other underage Greyhound passengers a bottle of Sake. While it was a memorable experience, it was quite brief, so I’ll leave this one in it’s own category.

And the 15 States I have never set foot in:

New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, South Dakota, Hawaii

Like someone trying to see the back of their own head, I did not realize until this morning when I looked in the mirror of Alissa’s computer at this blog that there was a horrendous image behind the header. To my consternation, it turned out to be that most hated of Microsoft stock-footage, that “blue hills” picture that every moron has on their office desktop/slideshow. Only slight more insidious is that beach image that came as the Windows XP default desktop. That aside, for some reason I couldn’t see the image on my own computer, and if you’re reading this, I hope you couldn’t see it on yours because man that shit looked like shit. And if there’s one thing I care about, it’s textual aesthetics.

My apologies for the dumb ugly previously all up ins.

Although my current ongoing quest is to return to higher education, I still gotta eat in the mean time. So, this Wednesday I am going back for my second interview for an Area Coordinator job with the Center for Literacy, the largest and oldest literacy non-profit here in the City of Brotherly Love. I am very, very much excited about the prospect of working with these folks, especially as good work’s been hard to find for someone with my interests and qualifications for the past few years.

My singular experience in Japan this year aside, I haven’t had a job I really felt great about since working full time for Student Support Services at Rutgers in 2004/2005, where I built the English tutoring program from the ground up. Work like this is great, but hard to come by and my experience paints me into a corner somewhat in terms of finding meaningful employment. So the chance to get back into working on literacy issues with underprivileged communities, especially in this town where god knows we need it, is really exciting. The first interview went stellar, and I hope the second will be the same. I’m trying not to get to overconfident because there are a number of variables that could cause me to not get the position, most of all that I’ll be going to grad school next Fall and can’t give a multi-year time commitment. This has cost me a few jobs in the past few months, and I’m banking on this organization having a high turnover rate so that they’ll be more sympathetic.

Anyway, for the second interview I had to write an essay for them and send it in, which I did last week. I thought this was kind of funny, and weird, but I realized it’s so that they can judge your own levels of literacy, and that’s fine. My would-be boss and I really started to testify to each other about how strongly we each feel about the need for a more rigorous approach to proper English spelling, grammar and style. We also waxed political awhile about the issues we face in this line of work, and that dovetails with the short essay I had to write for them.

The question they gave, vague as hell frankly, was “Why is there a literacy problem in the United States?” They may as well have been asking “Why do bad things happen?” I found this broadness more than a little annoying, so in my response I did my best to parse the various issues involved while not going too overboard. More or less, the answer is that the roots of social inequality in this country mostly come down to racism (against blacks and immigrants) on the one hand, and anti-poor discrimination in general on the other. However, these things need not even still exist (although they do) because the cycle produced by these historical forces has become so solidly self-perpetuating that it locks individuals and communities in so tightly that they are more or less trapped. That is of course without a combination of herculean personal effort and the right kinds of helping hands from the right places. Having seen with my own eyes the cycle of poverty broken while working with underprivileged kids at Rutgers, I know it can be done, but I also know that it ain’t easy, and that laissez-faire economics are the way backwards, not forwards.

Here’s what I wrote and submitted:

To begin to think about the cause of the literacy problem in the United States is to first recognize that the issue is rooted in a number of inter-related causes. I feel strongly that conflating the various historical, economic and social roots and the ongoing conditions that sustain the current situation under a single explanation necessarily oversimplifies the issue. This is important to understand not only for the sake of historical accuracy, but because any generalized picture of this problem creates a point of departure that is far too vague and unwieldy to begin to formulate truly effective strategies for dealing with the various root causes in question. It is also important in making these distinctions to determine which issues a non-profit, for example, would be most effective at addressing, and which are better addressed by other means. Further, it is also important to also acknowledge the wide range of specific problems that fall under the “literacy” category, to the end of systematically addressing each in the most effective way.

That being said, it seems to me that the most fundamental root cause of the current literacy problem is the political disenfranchisement of various groups of people through historically racist, anti-poor and anti-immigrant policies. This kind of political segregation has set the stage for both the economic and educational sides of the current coin, leaving large groups of people set apart from the means toward literacy and the economic security that allows for quality literacy education. The general trend in US political culture of fending for oneself, and insisting that others do the same, has only served to exasperate the problem. Recognizing however that despite the common cause, the realities on the ground take on different qualities, each of which—short of broad political and economic change—must be dealt with semi-separately.

In the case of non-English speaking immigrant communities, the general culture of work insists that one must speak English to have access to meaningful employment. And yet despite the benefits of providing quality English-language training to new arrivals, no such program is even discussed. In this case, working from the ground up to provide these communities the level of English-language skills that will provide them fair access to jobs and the like is the clear first step.

On the other hand, with regard to other disenfranchised communities that face similar hurdles to meaningful employment and high-quality public education, though in many different ways, the specifics of how literacy plays into that are at times different. The cycle of poverty within the urban African American community, for example, is both the cause and effect of unsafe and under-funded schools and a lack of access to quality education in areas like literacy, as well as math and science. Clearly, African Americans are native English speakers, so the issue is not working with “English” as such, but rather honing various written and spoken skills with regard to providing access to better employment, self-expression and even community-based political clout. This is obviously an inter-generational issue, and the solution requires long-term effort. The issues plaguing the community are most often rooted in economics, so to cut into the cycle for both adults and young people through the activities of an organization like CFL is the beginning of addressing a whole host of related problems. Access to literacy means access to better jobs and other cultural resources, which means everything from more stable homes, less risk for young people getting involved in crime and better funded and safer schools. Much of the same can be said about poor rural communities as well, especially with regard to access.

Looking at it this way, the cause of the literacy problem is in a sense the literacy problem itself. By setting up a cycle that denies people access to literacy, the problem of literacy takes on a life of its own, creating other problems that then compound the literacy issue. That in turn perpetuates the growing distance between individuals and the tools they need to sever these kinds of bonds. Without placing blame or disrespecting the different communities in question, a frank and candid discussion of these causes and the possibilities and limits of what can be done about the problem is necessary to begin to solve it. It seems to me that among the current causes, the one that can be most directly addressed and rectified through community education is the perpetuation of the cycle of literacy related problems. To begin to break that cycle is not to remove the most basic historical root causes, but can indeed provide an effective first step toward rectifying the situation on a broad scale.

Walking home down Baltimore Ave. tonight in the 6pm pitch, after having debarked the nausea-inducing and overcrowded 34 trolley, I came upon a number of fascinating items assembled together. Just outside the People’s Market, in front of the Sunoco station at around 45th and Baltimore, the following were gathered:

1. A fire
2. A car, containing the fire
3. A lot of smoke (mostly smoke) coming out of the hood of the car, billowing out and across and above the street
4. Firemen, busying themselves with the above
5. A firetruck; my guess is that the firemen brought it along with them
6. Onlookers, of all size, shapes and assorted varieties

Prior to this, while still on the trolley, I noticed an old man who I would assume by his trappings was homeless, intently reading the new Christopher Hitchens book on atheism, God is Not Great.

Combined, these two things have made my commute home today rather interesting.

Yesterday was election day, and Michael Nutter won the mayorship of America’s 5th largest city by a record landslide. Not bad for a guy who started off dead last in the polls during the primaries. The Democratic primaries being, if you don’t know, the real election here because no Republican stands a chance in Hell’s Kitchen of winning the mayor spot. To be fair, Al Taubenberger, the Republican who ran for the hell of it, really does seem like a decent guy who cares about the city. It’s funny, but it’s so so much that he’s a Republican that he lost, but more because he and Nutter have almost exactly the same beliefs on everything.

Everyone around town and at work is talking about Nutter today, how he’ll do and the like. His most controversial idea is a stop-and-frisk campaign in the worst neighborhoods to find people with concealed weapons. I’m ambivalent about this. I’m not sure this’ll really do anything but piss people the fuck off and catch a lot of kids with weed. The debate around the computers was hot at work today among the office ladies (all of whom I have a lot of respect for, to be clear–most of them are African American single moms who living in a dangerous city and are trying to do right by their kids, and god bless them). There was a chorus of protest against the frisking idea, with a lone dissenter exasperatedly saying, “I don’t care, come search me I got nothing–they got to do something, these streets are bad,” an understatement to be sure. Someone else did offer anecdotal evidence of this practice netting a number of illegal gun-toters a few years back, so who knows. I’m not interested in living in a police state, but West Philly being on par with Baghdad right now, something does have to give.

I often ponder over these urban issues, and the ultimate solution is pretty much clear: jobs with good pay and benefits (and affordable property taxes so people can buy homes at normal interest rates), but the huge hurdles there also loom large. I won’t rehearse what smarter people than I have said about this stuff. However, I do think that from my own experiences living elsewhere, especially traveling abroad, there are a few really important things that the city could and should do to start reinventing itself:

1. Expand the subway. To it’s credit, the city has been refurbishing old trolley lines all over town and will probably continue to do so. However, although quaint and usually fine, the trolley often gets stuck in traffic, and as it is the commute to the very far west of the city for many poorer people is upwards of an hour. They need to really think about getting the money from wherever to put in more subway lines than just the two that we already have. There’s a ton of jobs to be had in such a project. Also, they really, really need to have every single goddamn subway station manned with both a SEPTA employee and a police box, not to mention cameras. People just don’t feel safe in some of these stations, and it’s ridiculous that you can’t buy tokens at every place the trolley or train stops. If I get on the Greenline at 34th, I have to pay $2, where it’s only $1.40 if I get it at 15th–what the fuck is that?
2. One of the most impressive things for me about the massive, seething pool of modern life known as Tokyo was the fact that business, jobs and recreation where concentrated in multiple neighborhoods around the city, rather than all just clumped together in the middle. Center city is great if you’re either wealthy enough to live there or have a car/money for a trans-pass. But if you’ve ever gone down to some of the more remote neighborhoods, you can tell it’s as if CC doesn’t even exist. A friend of mine worked in a school in the northeast where few of the kids had ever even been to the center of town! In place like this, there are usually more and less makeshift economies that sprout up to serve the needs of the community. Well, instead of concentrating all the jobs and businesses in CC, why not support these satellite economies? Bringing jobs to these places would only benefit the city. And who knows, since they are closer to the wealth and prosperity of the suburbs, perhaps it’ll start bringing in money from there.

This is all I have for now, but I think that there are a number of ways in which a place like Philly needs to start thinking outside the box. I hope Nutter has the nutters to at least initiate that process.

Last night, Alissa, Angela and I hosted a really successful Halloween party here at the apartment in West Philly. The real credit is due to the girls, who put it together and had the idea in the first place. A number of people from around the city and from Jersey came out, most excitingly for me a number of my cousins. My family is quite large, and the nature of our upbringing–communal in the strongest sense of it–disallows any of us from thinking of “extended family” in any way other than being our brothers and sisters.

Among the favored guests for me was my cousin VJ and his girlfriend, who I often see at family functions, but rarely get to hang out with outside that context. To be sure, our family functions are many and often, usually boisterous as a circus, and always feature a table laden with food so good you couldn’t imagine eating anywhere else. So, it’s not as if we don’t see each other, but to really hang out in a different, non-family context, especially at my place here in Philly was a true pleasure.

My cousin showed up early (more of my cousins would come later that evening) and went out sightseeing around Old City. After they got back later, we spent some time around the dining room table talking about the latest goings on in his life. My cousin did a few years at community college, and hadn’t had any intention of continuing academically because he has an excellent job as a union carpenter. Last July he herniated a disk in his back, and had been out of work until last Monday however. Unfortunately, on his first day back on the job, at some site, up 40 feet in the air, he bent over to pick something up, straightened up and his back just went. He said he was kind of afraid, he couldn’t move his back and just stood there with eyes closed up on a beam trying not to move for being in excruciating pain. He ended up having to be lowered on the forks of a forklift, one of the huge ones, all the way down.

Now, when I worked produce lo those many years, we used to use the forklift to lift people up on top of what they call “the box,” the big freezer, which has storage area on top of it. But that is nothing like being lowered 40 feet in agony, trying not to move. So, after all this my cousin started talking to the people in admissions at Rutgers, my dear alma mater, about enrolling there for next Fall. As he put it, he’s 23 years old, and despite carpentry (especially in the union) being an excellent job (especially in Jersey where there is so much construction constantly) he said, “I gotta get this hammer out of my hand. There are guys 50 years old who can’t even move.”

It looks like Rutgers will be taking from 45 - 60 of his credits, probably all 60, making him a junior going in for, and of this I am proud and excited, Labor Studies. Rutgers has a great department there, and being from a labor family, I know everyone else is going to be excited about this choice also. I think his intentions are to continue to work for the union in an administrative capacity, which to me sounds perfect.

Later on in the evening a load of other people showed up, including three of my other cousins with their entourage, my cousin Mike dressed convincingly as an office secretary  “LaBelle,” his brother as his boss “Mr. Stoneford.” A heated exchange ensued about the most pressing issue dividing the nation right now: jeans vs. sweatpants. I think that for the friends who were there who didn’t know my family very well yet, or had never seen us en masse, it was surely something of a sight. The upstairs neighbors even came down to see what the commotion was, thinking that there was some kind of fight happening.

Everything wrapped up around 3:30, and after having had a full and bustling house for an evening, I was really satisfied and happy to have brought everyone together. Like I said, when you grow up in a small army, you tend to revel in the large loud crowd, and doubly so when you can be the instrument of everyone’s coming together. I particularly enjoy times when things reach a critical mass of people who don’t know each other, such that they become self-sustainingly social.

A number of great people from around Philly also showed up, my friends from the warehouse and a group of their friends. They trailed along a few obnoxious people but I guess that’s the price you pay. I just have strong feelings about only inviting the people you invite to parties, especially when it’s meant to be more intimate. I want to bring my friends together, not some strangers who are just going to stick to themselves, be rude and leave. I know that’s the norm with parties, but I hate parties so there you go. A really interesting guy from Argentina came, as well as a few folks who I don’t know so well who turned out to be nice (along with the ones I didn’t know at all and turned out to be stupid). I feel like I’m just too old for strangers who lack substance being something I should have to deal with. I decided a few years ago that what I’m really interested in is fortifying and continuing to enrich a (relatively large, to be fair) selected group of extremely meaningful friendships, exclude even bothering with most new people, and establishing a selection of clearly awesome and interesting new people to integrate into the first group. Part of that is bringing those newer and older people together to enrich and deepen the substance of both. I see friendships as being something like sex: most people are completely deceived into thinking that having large numbers of superficial relationships will either fulfill them or even make them happy, let alone get them some good sex. But when you spend a long time with someone, getting to know each other on progressively deeper levels, it only becomes richer.

I need some food, but I don’t know if I should brave Ben Remsen’s cooking, or make myself some eggs.